JHR's summer job

Dad used to regale us with stories of how he put himself through college. He had a variety of odd jobs, bought and rented out cars, drove people back and forth across the United States (the most famous was the actress Donna Reed. Prior to her fame, of course). One of my favorite stories was about one of his summer jobs while he was still in high school, though.

Dad went to Flushing High School in NYC and graduated when he was 16. He was very proud that he got an excellent education there from teachers who all wore Phi Beta Kappa keys.

One summer, before he went on to Syracuse University, he got a job with one of the steam or ferry boat tour companies on the Hudson. They took people out to show them the sights up and down the river while someone, over a loud speaker, announced each sight by saying something like: "On the left you will see...". Of course the tourists would all then rush over to that side of the ship and the vessel would tend to dip into the water under all the additional weight.

In the late 1800s there had been a horrible steamboat accident where many people were killed, after that ships were under a lot of pressure, even in the 1930s, to make safety an issue. To keep this ship from capsizing under the weight of all the passengers standing on any one side of the ship's upper deck, they had hired men to roll barrels full of sand on a deck below to the opposite side of the ship, thus creating a ballast of sorts. I believe this was one of Dad's least favorite summer jobs. He was a tall and very thin teenager. He might have been crushed had a sand barrel rolled back on him as the deck above slowly rocked from one side to the other. Like he said, he only had that job for one summer. I'm thinking that pin-setting in the local bowling alley was a better favorite.

We will sorely miss his stories.